When I reached Ron Katz on Monday, the first word out of his mouth was “vindication.”

He was referring to Tom Brady. “The moral issues always remain the same,” said Katz, the chairman emeritus of the Institute of Sports Law and Ethics at Santa Clara University and now a Distinguished Careers Institute Fellow at Stanford.

“It’s not what you can get away with,” he said. “You’ve got to rise above that.”

Brady is one of the greatest quarterbacks ever to play the game, and I would have him on my starting team each Sunday. But he has lost credibility that he may never regain.

The Brady case — his role in improperly deflated footballs — seemed silly at first. But this molehill became a mountain that the N.F.L. was willing to die on to protect its shield.

The case has been a winding road to the truth since January 2015, after the Patriots’ lopsided victory over Indianapolis in the A.F.C. championship game.

The most extraordinary evidence against Brady was the Wells report, which suggested that Brady did not always play by the rules when it came to using properly inflated footballs.

Based on the report, Commissioner Roger Goodell suspended Brady for four regular-season games. The Patriots were also fined $1 million and lost a couple of draft picks, including this year’s No. 1. Brady argued that he was unfairly suspended.

Last September, Judge Richard M. Berman said Goodell administered “his own brand of industrial justice“ and overturned Goodell’s ruling. That decision allowed Brady to play the entire season, a season he used as a revenge tour and one that New England fans turned into a football holy war.

Monday’s ruling by the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit ripped apart every shred of Berman’s decision. It reaffirmed Goodell’s broad authority to administer discipline as he pleases and it affirmed his power. This is power that the N.F.L. Players Association willingly gave up during the last collective bargaining agreement.

Players who challenged Goodell’s authority — Adrian Peterson and Greg Hardy — were emboldened by what they perceived as a crack in Goodell’s armor. They challenged his authority with lawsuits. But Monday’s decision was loud and clear: Goodell has the hammer again and is willing to drop it.

I am all for resisting and challenging authority. But the deflation scandal was never a noble cause. Brady was caught cheating and was uncooperative, having his phone destroyed around the time league investigators wanted access to it.

“I would say this goes beyond power; I think it’s really about order,” Katz said. “You can’t have a league unless somebody has the authority to make decisions. Otherwise you have disorder, you have chaos.”

It’s about order and Brady’s stature.

Celebrity may have gotten Brady a favorable decision from Berman, but it was ultimately not enough to keep him from being suspended.

”If this case had been brought by a journeyman quarterback, he would not have gotten beyond the 1-yard line,” Katz said.

He added: “The only reason it got as far as it did was because it was Tom Brady. We have a celebrity-driven society, but when you get to court, it doesn’t matter if you’re a celebrity.”

After two years of missteps, Goodell is on a roll. Earlier this month, a court of appeals upheld a Federal District Court judge’s decision approving the N.F.L. concussion settlement agreement.

Linda S. Greene, the Evjue-Bascom law professor at the University of Wisconsin, draws a sharp distinction between how Goodell successfully handled the Brady case and how he mishandled the Ray Rice investigation, protecting a star player and his team in a clear case of domestic abuse.

“This is a win for the commissioner,” Greene said, “but unlike in the Ray Rice case, where the decision was the byproduct of a commissioner who looked the other way at Rice’s egregious conduct, the Brady suspension was the product of a thorough investigation, a lengthy hearing over which the commissioner presided.”

The union released a statement on Monday. It was disappointed by the ruling, adding that it would “carefully review the decision, consider all of our options and continue to fight for players’ rights and for the integrity of the game.”

Katz said, “They negotiated this agreement where the commissioner had this power, and that’s the way it should have proceeded.”

The union should stop the fight for Brady. Brady’s team of legal advisers should tell him to accept the decision.

The court’s 2-1 decision can be appealed to the full Second Circuit Court of Appeals and to the Supreme Court.

“I don’t think the Supreme Court will have any interest in this whatsoever,” Katz said. “It’s done.”

Brady should take the sack and let the sport he has soiled have its vindication.

Correction:

A Sports of The Times column on April 26 about a court ruling affirming N.F.L. Commissioner Roger Goodell’s broad authority to administer discipline to players like Tom Brady misstated, in one instance, the name of the court that made the ruling. As the article correctly noted elsewhere, it is the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, not the United States Circuit Court of Appeals Second District.

Email: wcr@nytimes.com

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page B12 of the New York edition with the headline: With Brady Ruling, Goodell Is Firmly in Control. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe